Traditional outbound call management equipment is used for any number of purposes, for example, to take surveys to determine customer satisfaction, to seek political opinions, to do market research, to offer for sale products and services, to do fund-raising activities or for other purposes. These uses and applications are merely exemplary and the uses of such outbound call management equipment are only limited by the imagination of its users or customers.
Traditional outbound call management equipment involves the automatic dialing of a list of target telephone numbers. The target telephone numbers may be those of previous customers, clients, a random sample of the public at large, members of political parties or previous donors to a charity in keeping with the examples given above. Serving outbound call management equipment may be located in the same local exchange or the outbound call service area may involve wide area telephone service or long distance communications. The called target parties who answer the calls may be directed to live agents immediately upon answer or after a period of time during which the called party may interact with the system (having query, response capability, such as interactive voice response capability as further discussed herein) to respond to some basic questions. Consequently, depending on the sophistication of known outbound call management systems, there may come a point in time when there is a need to speak with a live agent who then interacts with the target called parties, typically at a call distribution service position station.
A telecommunications services customer (such as a charity or a polital party) seeking such outbound call management services presently has two alternatives involving a live service representative. The customer can purchase expensive outbound call management hardware and software themselves and/or associate the equipment and hardware with their own private telephone system. But they must hire their own agents to speak with target called parties and perform their own system design. The customer's other alternative is to use the services of a special service bureau or services provided by a telecommunications service provider such as a local or toll common carrier which has already obtained requisite hardware and software and hired live agents to converse with target called parties. Both of these service alternatives may be unsatisfactory for many outbound call telephone service customers. The cost of the hardware and software needed to effectuate outbound call management can be prohibitive, for example, for an individual or a small charitable organization and may involve the costs of the use of live agents to converse with target called party queries.
Recently, interactive voice response services have been introduced which to some extent alleviate problems with known outbound call management systems. Outbound calling is a feature that may be provided by such interactive voice response (IVR) service providers to their customers. Inbound calling is also a feature that may be provided by IVR service providers. For example, a large commercial bank may provide IVR inbound calling services to their banking customers to check the status of their bank accounts. Interactive voice response systems typically involve speech recognition and natural language understanding algorithms. The need for a live service agent may be diminished or even eliminated for many typical outbound (or inbound) calls. In inbound systems, generally, it has been found that callers to the system are desirous of receiving the information the system offers. Consequently, there is little or no concern in in-bound systems of anyone intentionally trying to tie up the system.
On the other hand, in outbound IVR systems, targeted called parties tend to treat the calling system as an unwanted call. There may be a delay in connecting the IVR equipment to the caller. The caller may recognize the connection delay as indicating an unwanted call and hang up. The caller identification data for a call to a target called party may warn the party that the call is not one from a friend or family member. If the target called party answers, there may be a tendency of the called party if they do not like the call to intentionally cause the outbound calling service provider to expend unnecessary resources in time, equipment and live agent resources. On the other hand, many target called parties will immediately hang up when reached which may be an indicator of an unsuccessful approach or the selection of a target audience that is not appropriate.
When provided by a common carrier via a telecommunications network, for example, AT&T Corp. provides VoiceTone™ IVR services, the advantages of decreasing the costs, for example, of providing a large number of agents and the costs of equipment may be shared among several users of the IVR service. However, whether outbound calling services are provided by IVR service providers, by customers purchasing their own equipment or by customers' using a service bureau, there may come a time when service may need to be provided via a replacement site, for example, for routine scheduled maintenance or in the event of an equipment failure or natural or other disaster. There are situations when outbound calling traffic needs to be redirected from one outbound calling production site, for example, of the IVR service provider, the customer site or the service bureau to another server site, in order to provide twenty four hour per day, seven day per week support for an outbound calling service capability. “Server” as used herein may be used interchangeably with the term “platform.” Examples of situations requiring switching to an alternative site include: one site goes into a scheduled maintenance mode, problems are encountered on the platform/server at a site, network connection failures occur due to breakdown of equipment at intermediate sites between the provider and the called party, there is a natural disaster such as an earthquake, weather related calamity or fire at the original site, the traffic handling capacities at one site reach extreme limits where either the IVR equipment or number of agents becomes taxed such that outbound services cannot be provided efficiently or other examples only limited by the imagination. While some service bureaus provide for alternative service bureau sites, any switching of services to an alternative site or sharing of service provision with the alternate site is limited and may be predetermined. For example, there may be service bureau locations across the United States and around the world in different time zones to handle overflow or to provide additional live agents at different times of the day. But the amount of traffic carrying capacity, viewed either in terms of time of day of availability or service carrying ability of equipment or agent resources during a given time of day, may be limited and predetermined. There are difficulties in switching from one site to another to be sure that the new site is equipped with software, facilities and trained personnel to handle the particular service area of the target population of the target called parties of the outbound system to be turned down or to receive temporary relief but remain active.
Consequently, there is an urgent need to provide an economical outbound call management apparatus and procedures accessible to a wide spectrum of those who use outbound telecommunications calling services which can redirect outbound calling services to another site when necessary.